Solid State UX

Roger Schank's most ambitious idea, The Reminding Machine, would be a massive collection of stories cataloguing what "smart people" know and how they deal with complex situations.

In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.

Theory #5 – Case-Based Reasoning

Most famous learning theories seem to be closely associated with a personality (sometimes a pair of them), but few stand so fully in their author’s shadow as case-based reasoning does in that of Roger Schank.   Schank is a bit of a rarefied character in the world of educational psychology – probably because he has serious chops in the far sexier field of Artificial Intelligence(AI).   UX people will relate to this theory, because it is basically saying people learn by prototyping stuff.    In Schank’s model, learners create generalizations from a rich set of case histories, rather than from explicitly rendered rules or other forms of procedural knowledge.   Schank’s theories might be likened to a branching network of potential outcomes in which the learner induces her way to the correct path by failing in the other ones.   This is often not the byproduct of actual failure, but the more subtle letdown that occurs when something is not what the learner expects to see.  He calls these “expectation failures,” which he proposes are more easily indexed by the brain and therefore are a higher form of learning than, say, rote memorization.  It won’t surprise you that a variant of CBR, rule-induction, is a cornerstone of machine learning theory.

In applying CBR to instructional design, there are a few basic strategies.   Designers of expert systems are very fond of the theory, and you will see it referred to in the type of case-database applications used by customer service help desks.  But of more generalized interest, any design where cases, stories, or narrative are used to communicate instructional material can be thought of as being influenced by CBR.   Business and Law Schools are addicted to this sort of learning, of course.  But why not apply it to your web designs in order to increase their persuasive power?  To make your environment more compliant with case-based reasoning theory, there are all sorts of practical solutions you can implement:

• Develop multimedia content as a “set” of realistic and specific situations
• Be like a business school – set forward realistic examples then provide your user with a heuristic for evaluating them
• Consider the “fixed choice” option – describe a case, then provide a fixed number of plausible solutions
• Clearly articulate problem, question, or dilemma
• Allow users a safe place to test predictions, and give feedback on incorrect paths

The McKinsey careers site uses a nicely designed case-study approach. By exploring the profiles of various employees at the firm, a prospect can inference the answer to the basic questions poised below - such as "What will it be like if I join?" (design: IconNicholson)

La Salle University offers a virtual MBA online that is highly influenced by Roger Schank's work. Students study cases and simulted business scenarios in a computerized environment. This is also a great example of situated learning theory.